Google Analytics enables you to find answers to these questions by analyzing your website traffic. This allows you to make improvements and adjustments to your website based on your visitor’s behavior. For you to get the most out of them, you need to know the most important Google Analytics Metrics.
What Google Analytics Metrics are Most Important?
Sessions
It’s extremely important to know the number of visitors your website receives. Sessions represent the number of visitors that come to your website. This is one of the most straightforward ways to use Google Analytics to measure your site traffic; if a visitor is inactive for more than 30 minutes and comes back, it is counted as a new session.
Users: New Vs Returning
Other than being able to see the volume of traffic for your website, Google Analytics tells you the number of unique users. This will tell you if you have an increase in sessions from unique visitors that are returning or if you are garnering more new unique visitors.
This metric is very helpful to determine where you need to focus your marketing efforts. If you have a larger portion of returning users and a low number of new visitors, then you should consider targeting potential new visitors. The higher portion of new visitors means you should focus on retention.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate represents the number of single-page visitors your website receives. More specifically, this is the number of visitors that came to your website, did not click anything, and then left.
This is bad for many reasons. You want your visitors to visit multiple pages, read articles, look at your services or products, and potentially purchase something.
Though it seems scary for a page to have a high bounce rate, it isn’t always as bad as it seems. If a visitor comes to your site and reads an article, signs up for your newsletter in a popup, and then leaves, this isn’t that bad. A customer could also land on your contact page, call you and then leave your site.
All of these factors mean you should pay close attention to your Google Analytics bounce rate and understand what you’re expecting users to do on each page.
Traffic Sources
Another important Google Analytics metric is traffic sources. This tells you exactly where your visitors came from; whether it is social media, directly, organic search, or paid search. With this information, you can focus your marketing campaigns on the most effective sources of traffic.
Top Landing Pages
Google Analytics also allows you to see what pages your visitors are landing on. This metric will give you the ability to find the most effective practices for your pages. With this information, you can adjust your pages to better optimize performance, focus your optimization efforts on the pages that receive the most traffic and invest time in lowering bounce rates to drive traffic to the rest of your site.
Nextfly Can Help You Understand Your Google Analytics Metrics.
Do you need help understanding your Google Analytics metrics or building a better digital marketing strategy? Nextfly Web Design can help answer your questions and help you build a digital marketing strategy that will benefit your business immensely. Contact us today to learn more!